


Rule of Three

by coldcobalt



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: 1960s, 1970s, Camping, Fluff, M/M, Mutual Pining, fic locked for ooc but i'm leaving it up, roche lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-10-01 00:02:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20455757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldcobalt/pseuds/coldcobalt
Summary: The first time they visit the cabin, it’s a stakeout.The second time, it’s an escape.The third time, it's something else entirely.





	Rule of Three

The first time they visit the cabin, it’s a stakeout. 

Dan steers the rental car up the access road with nervous hands, trees flashing by in flickers of green. Lying horizontally across the backseat, Rorschach holds a plastic bag and pretends, completely unconvincingly, to not be carsick.

It’s a long-shot lead they’re following, tracking a Mafia capo that slipped the city borders. And the cabin hasn’t been used for fifteen years, the deed’s probably still in Dan’s father’s name, the door’s likely rotted off its hinges by now— but their mark was last spotted twenty miles away from the property line, so why not take advantage? Dan can still picture the firepit, a decade of childhood summers. Maybe it won’t be so bad.

Behind him, Rorschach retches.

The forest rolls on where the roadway curves, and Dan doesn’t turn around. “We've got awhile to go. Want me to pull over?”

Some more gagging noises, the sour smell of bile. In the rearview mirror, Rorschach hocks and spits, pulls the mask back down with obvious aggravation.

“Just drive.” 

So Dan does.

They’re the only car for miles. On the distant horizon, the mountains rise.

*

When they finally arrive, it’s agony. The cabin is smaller than Dan remembers, and significantly more ramshackle. It’s hard to conjure up happy memories with everything coated in dust, even harder when sharing space with a man who regards him with such obvious contempt. But the forest is as tranquil as Dan expects it to be, and that’s almost, almost enough.

Rorschach spends two days slapping away mosquitos and complaining. Dan raises his voice, says a few things he regrets afterwards.

Their fight blows over, eventually. They never do catch the mobster.

\-------

The second time, it’s an escape.

Summer’s just begun, but the city’s already staggering under the season’s weight: more muggings than usual, a spate of robberies during humid nights. A brick shatters a dive bar’s window, and the ensuing riot swallows the Village whole. 

So against Rorschach’s protests, Dan loads a car with snacks and provisions (and at the last minute: his partner), and navigates them north.

This time, Rorschach doesn’t vomit because he’s passed out by the time they hit the GWB. It’s very slightly bullshit, dereliction of duty and all that—he’s supposed to be Dan’s co-pilot, The Map Guy, regardless of type of vehicle, but Dan doesn’t wake him. He’s been especially tightly-strung lately, short-tempered and vibrating with his own personal brand of Rorschachian anxiety, and that’s not a minefield Dan’s looking to navigate right now.

(He’s not sure that his partner’s been sleeping much, recently. He’s not confident that Rorschach has anywhere _ to _sleep.)

So Dan leaves him as he is—body hunched with exhaustion, mask pressed against the passenger-side window—and merges onto the Parkway.

*

The cabin lights sputter out just before dark. It’s not really surprising; they’re pretty high up the ridge, and it’s not like Con-Ed really maintains the power lines this far out from civilization. But the noise that Rorschach makes sounds like he thinks the cabin has elected to fail _him_, personally. Like he’s thinking of stepping outside, going a couple rounds with a telephone pole to scare it into submission.

“Hey, whoa. There’s nothing to worry about. It’s just us up here.”

Somewhere outside the windows, crickets trill. The moon looms over the treeline.

“Not worried.” Rorschach’s mask floats in the twilight, a phantom in the gloom. “Too quiet. Too _ empty_. Nothing to do here; should be back in the city, making a difference.”

“There’s more to life than just decking people, you know.” Dan pats the pockets of his shorts, feeling for the matchbook. “C’mon, help me light a fire.”

*

The triangle base of logs is easy enough, and the secondary twigs too; this far into summer, the ground is littered with kindling, dry from the heatwave. Dan slots everything into place with more than a little deja-vu.

_ You can take the boy out of the Scouts, but you can’t take the Scouts out out of the boy. _ He turns the mangled idiom over in his head a few times, winces. _ Something like that, anyway. _

Something hoots in the distance. He shoves more leaves onto the pile.

Unsurprisingly, Rorschach isn’t much help. He watches from the lip of the firepit, arms tightly crossed: the humidity has coaxed his hat and trenchcoat and suit jacket off, left them draped over a fallen tree at the edge of the clearing, gotten him to roll his cuffs up farther than Dan’s ever seen them. But the mask stays.

“Alright,” Dan says. “Here we go.” 

The match flares in the darkness. Dan touches the tiny flame to the pile of kindling and blows a breath through cupped, careful hands. The fire grows quickly, shuddering to life like a living thing, beautiful in its fury. Sparks shoot into the night sky.

Rorschach stares. 

“What? Did I get ash on my face?” Dan wipes at his cheek with the pad of his thumb, but his hand comes away clean. 

“No.” Rorschach says. His voice is low, uncharacteristically quiet. “Nothing.” 

He uncrosses his arms, crosses them again, flexes ungloved fingers against his shirtsleeves. The fire roars.

*

They cook hotdogs and marshmallows on sticks scrounged from the woods—too many, Dan holds his stomach and groans, and even Rorschach seems to be moving a little sluggishly—all the food perfectly charred and smoky. The lightning bugs come out and the stars come out and _ this _ is what Dan comes here for, really: the moon and the fire and the vast span of space.

The firelight catches the edges of Rorschach’s shoulders, his latex jawline. For the rest of the evening, he doesn’t meet Dan’s eyes.

*

Across the room, Rorschach sleeps, curled frame drenched in moonlight. He’s so small, so still. 

Loneliness claws at Dan’s chest, squeezes it until his vision blurs.

\----

The third visit is something else entirely. 

Rorschach sits riding shotgun, brow furrowed; wind from the open window whips at his hair, pushing it even further into disarray. Dan knows he goes by Walter, knows he thinks of himself as Kovacs. But after a decade, neither of those names fit, not really.

Gravel crunches under the car’s tires, bucking the chassis, and Rorschach’s face blanches. Dan squeezes his knee once in reassurance, and keeps driving.

*

The campfire crackles. Dan’s arm is just the wrong side of too hot but he ignores it; it’s worth the discomfort to have his forearm draped across sharp shoulders, to have Rorschach tucked tight against his side.

Rorschach shifts. The firelight slips across the ragged angles of his face, the pale strands of his eyelashes. His eyes stay dark.

“So when did you. Y’know.” Dan asks. “With me.” 

He knows he’s pushing his luck a little, poking at the unsentimental limits of a notoriously private man, but hell. They’re in New England, in the middle of nowhere surrounded by the smell of pines and sound of crickets and everything, _ everything _seems right.

The exasperated noise Rorschach makes is pretty much what Dan expected.

“Fine, I’ll go first,” Dan says. “Sixty-five.”

Rorschach scoffs, and his expression doesn’t change. But he doesn’t lean away.

“Liar.”

“No, really.” Dan raises his free hand in a three-finger salute. “Scout’s honor. You nailed that rapist with a perfect hook and my heart went pitter-patter.” 

It’s the truth, mostly. (It was never that simple.)

Dan looks up at the stars, suddenly nervous. “Okay, your turn.”

A grunt, an infinite pause, and Dan almost stops expecting an answer. He feels stupid, suddenly; they’ve never discussed this facet of the partnership, never verbally acknowledged this new, primarily physical _ thing_, and why would he even _ think_—

“The campfire. The first one.”

Rorschach's hair is fierce in the firelight: blood-red, spun gold. Dan’s never wanted to kiss anything more.

Rorschach doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to. Instead, he runs bony thumbs over the inside of Dan’s arm (thumbs that have threatened to crush windpipes; hands that have broken bones and lifted children from squalid dens and guided Nite Owl from fraught patrols safely home). The sudden lump in Dan’s throat quashes any hope of a response.

Dan thinks of a decade of furtive glances, of tension stretched tight across alleyways to its breaking point. Of voices raised in futile anger, travelling in concentric circles but never getting any closer to those unspoken, essential words:_ I need you. I trust you. I _—

And then Rorschach’s weight is on his lap, and Rorschach’s mouth is on his jawline. The fire crackles under the canopy of stars, and Dan knows he doesn’t need to think about old lonely nights, not anymore.


End file.
